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5 Placing Culture on Hold The new Deal Coalition, its First Cracks, and the “Great melding” Takes shape i do everything i can [to make ends meet]. i’ve even gone out and competed with niggers to get jobs mowing lawns. —lorena hickok Although no one could know it at the time, the new Deal held within it the seeds of its own destruction. While the program would eventually develop into a coalition of unparalleled strength and effectiveness, it would also harbor tensions and contradictions that made it, from the beginning, temporary and ephemeral—doomed to do anything but last. nowhere would this be truer or more apparent than in the Deep south, in places like Alabama. For the new Deal in its complete sense was not one singular program or even a set of closely related goals. it was, far more accurately, a patchwork quilt of policies, initiatives, people, and agencies—schemes to do something, anything, to alleviate the unprecedented crisis that confronted the country. its goals and personalities—sometimes pacific, sometimes contradictory and competing, often confusing because of the sheer immenseness of the task that lay ahead—reached out to and subsumed a bewildering array of different Americans. by march 1933, the new Deal offered sanctuary for the weary and beleaguered from all walks of life: people of conservative nature and those with a more liberal bent; people beset by the revolutionary economic tempests of the age who had found little or no relief elsewhere. by the time Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as the country’s thirty-second president, most of them had nowhere else to go. so the new Deal became one and the same entity that responded to the plight of the rural inhabitant and the urban dweller; of actors, artists, authors, and playwrights; of bricklayers, iron molders, steel rollers, and textile workers; of unskilled teens who had never spent a night away from home; of country people accustomed to generations of poverty, debt, and no electricity or indoor plumbing; of widows; of 88 / Chapter 5 the starving, educated and uneducated; of the farmer and the city worker; of those who worked with their hands and those who worked with their minds; of the small town, the big city, and the sparsely dotted countryside. The unprecedented exigency that became known as the Great Depression eventually made all of these—and more—partners in the great experiment called the new Deal. For a while it also made them allies in the political expression and engine that drove the experiment: the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt. yet the new Deal could not—nor did it even attempt to, in most cases—reconcile the wildly divergent worldviews, philosophies, and beliefs that the kaleidoscope who called themselves “new Dealers” or new Deal supporters brought with them. The participants themselves looked on one another at best with curiosity, in some instances with downright suspicion and dislike. The new Deal contained the seeds of its own destruction because it brought together so many people with so little in common for a goal that so many of them understood to be only temporary. it brought together people who viewed the culture, religion , folkways, and even the languages of other constituent members as alien, foreign, even dangerous. it could not last. in fact, it is a testament to the political will and ability of its designers that the coalition managed to hold itself mostly together for nearly four decades. The break was apparent even before there was a new Deal. it was there at least as early as 1924 at the Democratic national Convention in new york. Alabama broke regional ranks to vote for a formal anti-Klan plank, laying bare the deep and seemingly insoluble differences between the two major wings that made up the Democratic Party.1 one was urban, industrial, and unionist, largely ethnic, wet, Catholic and Jewish, identified with the political machines of the great cities of the northeast and midwest; many of the allegiant could trace their roots to southern and eastern europe, some to liberalism, others even to radicalism. The other wing was dry, southern, Protestant, rural, and conservative, sometimes even fundamentalist, indifferent or unfriendly to big-city machines and unions, and staunchly, even overwhelmingly, Anglo-saxon. These were people, Democrats all, animated by the most profoundly different ideologies; people who found the other side’s culture alien, bewildering, and sometimes repugnant. yet the new Deal, which pasted this Democratic coalition together—and added millions...

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